Archive for the ‘Cultural issues’ Category
ABSOLUTELY FREE: A WONDERFUL COLLECTION OF FILM MAGAZINES & BROCHURES
February 28th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
Owing to the owner moving from a large house to a small flat, the following items are looking for a loving home: 474 film magazines: “Film Review” from January 1978 to December 2008 and “Empire” from July 2009 to December 2018 281 film brochures: popular movies of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s These magazines and brochures […]
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
The song “Shallow” from “A Star Is Born”
February 27th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
Looking at this week’s Academy Awards, I thought that “Green Book” and “Bohemian Rhapsody”, while good films, received too many awards, while I was sorry that “A Star Is Born” did not do better. The Lady Gaga song “Shallow” did deservedly win an award and you might like to listen to it below. If you’re not […]
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (1)
Word of the day: gobbet
February 26th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
A gobbet — from the Middle English word for a chunk of meat — is an extract from a primary source put forward for analysis. I’m doing a history course at the City Literary Institute in central London and our lecturer assigns us a gobbet each week to consider. It is literally a ‘chunk’ of […]
Posted in Cultural issues, History | Comments (0)
A review of the new film “If Beale Street Could Talk”
February 24th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
Writer and director Barry Jenkins won the Academy Award for Best Picture with “Moonlight” and, two years later, he has another artistic success to his credit. Again he both writes and directs; again he uses James Laxton as cinematographer; again he adapts an existing work (this time a James Baldwin novel); again we have a […]
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
A review of the recent film “Funny Cow”
February 17th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
I saw this film this weekend in a church hall in London’s Winchmore Hill where it was shown by a community cinema project called “Talkies” and followed by a question & answer session with Lindsey Coulson, a local actress who plays the drunkard mother of the titular character, a comedienne attempting to succeed in the […]
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
A review of the new sci-fi movie “Alita: Battle Angel”
February 13th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
A movie co-written and co-produced by the legendary James Cameron (“Avatar”) and co-written and directed by the innovative Robert Rodriguez (“Sin City”) was always going to mean that something special was on offer and attract the attention of this sc-fi fan and I made sure to see it on an IMAX screen in 3D. Set […]
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
A review of the new movie” Green Book”
February 10th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
We are back in the territory of “Driving Miss Daisy” but with a role reversal. Here the driver is white – a traditional, working-class, family-orientated Italian-American – while the passenger is black – an educated and cultured African-American pianist who is a lonely figure unable to identify with either black or white communities. Another major […]
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
A review of the new film “Mary, Queen Of Scots”
February 9th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
In 1972, I went to the cinema to a see a film with exactly the same title, telling the same late 16th century story, with Vanessa Redgrave as the Scottish Catholic queen and Glenda Jackson as her English Protestant cousin and rival Elizabeth. Almost half a century later, I returned to the theatre to see […]
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
A review of the new film “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”
February 8th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
On the face of it, this is not a story that would have seemed to have had sufficient appeal to succeed as a movie, since it is centred on two profoundly lonely souls, one of whom is a forger, the other of whom is a serial trickster, both of whom drink far too much and […]
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
A review of the historical novel “Munich” by Robert Harris
February 3rd, 2019 by Roger Darlington
This is the latest and twelfth historical novel from this acclaimed master storyteller and the sixth that I have enjoyed. Whereas the first, “Fatherland”, presented a counterfactual view of the end of the Second World War – Germany and Britain sign a peace treaty and Hitler lives to be 75 – “Munich” is an essentially […]
Posted in Cultural issues, History | Comments (0)